What civil war was worse? The Second American Civil War in Rumsfeldia or the Second Russian Civil War in The Death of Russia?
Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo/Rumsfeldia Con't
- Thread starter David Ritz
- Start date
Uh....
How does California's secession trigger the rise of the CV? Are you saying if California stayed, its presence could've prevented the CV from amassing the power it did?
I think both featured nuclear arms, mass murder, and psychotic reactionary figures.
But I think in terms of horror, America might be worse. Russia is a nation that has always been violent and authoritarian, so to see America, a democratic albeit flawed nation, descending into such depths would be even more traumatizing, the same way the Holocaust was seen as horrific because it saw the most civilized nation in Europe descend into barbarity.
"The land of the free became a mass grave", someone might say.
That's not what I mean. I meant they were both separate factors that led to 2ACW. California seceded and that set the precedent for States to secede under Robertson.
I think secession is a reaction to repression than a cause of the civil war itself.
FloridaMan561
Banned
I'm inclined to agree with this interpretation. It might be the starting moment, but not the outright cause.
Tim LaHaye is not even that fringe, certainly not fringe enough to spearhead the bombing of Congress.
I’m unconvinced FLaG America’s 70s were substantially worse than OTL’s 70s or that the political scandals were any worse then OTL’s. Even if it was, why would the US go the absolutely bonkers route that it did? It wouldn’t be out of the question for there to be authoritarianism of some kind, but an ancap dictatorship? And under Donald Rumsfeld of all people?
That doesn’t make them the American Taliban. It certainly doesn’t make them willing to conduct a nuclear civil war.
I'll reiterate that the sort of complete social breakdown and slide into authoritarianism that happens in the Gumboverse probably needed a PoD that went all the way back to the '50s at the very least.
As I recall, the old Losing the Peace TL could probably be described as a more realistic take on Rumsfeldia in some ways.
As I recall, the old Losing the Peace TL could probably be described as a more realistic take on Rumsfeldia in some ways.
Wonder what kind of POD could be used to avoided the slide into authoritarianism?
I've never heard of Losing the Peace before, what's it about?
Still, I imagine Gingrich and his ilk will probably write such a victim-blaming narrative, somehow blaming McCloskey and the Hawaiians for the rise of the CV.
In this narrative, I suppose Rumsfeld was the brave patriot defending liberty; the Democrats were also socialist traitors who were resisting true freedom, and McCloskey and the Hawaiians were disloyal puppets of Moscow, deliberately destabilizing America to unleash socialist and atheist tyranny. He'll go so far as to tar the Texas, Oregonian, and Alaskan secessionists in the same brush, calling them disloyal traitors.
Yes, this narrative is insane, since it ignores several things: that Rumsfeld deliberately used voting fraud to cheat McCloskey out of the White House, he then tried to force McCloskey out of the gubernatorial election he was rightly elected too. The rest of the political establishment enabled Rumsfeld to force the justices out of the Supreme Court, and the Rummy is the one who welcome the Jesus nuts into the White House where could effectively build a deep state to strangle what remained of America.
But remember, the whole Lost Cause movement itself was built on lies and distortions. Yet, the myth has proven so endurable that the West Virginians, whose state was formed out of a desire to break from the Confederacy, still celebrate the Confederates as "heritage."
If Gingrich could celebrate Rumsfeld openly, I dreaded that a Rumsfeldia heritage movement would still exist.
The premise begins with Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury in 1945, becoming President after Truman is killed.
Long story short, he enacts his postwar plan for Germany: balkanizing Germany, deliberately deindustrializing it, and causing millions of Germans to die from the economic and social damage, leading to many terrible butterflies that culminate in a fascist America.
The premise of Gumbo is more or less people who never had the power to screw up the world emerging from the shadows to get that power and screwing up the world.
In a post in Rumsfeldia, Drew justified his portrayal of Rumsfeld by taking his OTL micromanaging and self-centered and "efficiency-minded" attitude and amplifying it by having had him sit next to the throne as Agnew's advisor and making him hunger for more riches.
Coe is another obscure figure who gained prominence he didn't have OTL by changing circumstances.
Of course not, they were straw characters that only faintly resembled reality. Would’ve made no difference if instead they were replaced with fictitious characters.
It is and was a poor justification in my opinion.
Douglas Coe is an even more terrifying person in reality because of the manner in which he exercised political influence on both sides of the political spectrum and his international connections with both sides of the Cold War. I don't think that he would be whipping Sarah Palin in the White House but I don't doubt that he would have any disagreement if the US was seized by the likes of the "Christian Values" crowd.... most likely political position I think he would like to have would be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Like Mao Yuanxin, I never even heard of Douglas Coe before I read Gumbo.
It is frightening how that obscure fellow you never noticed could potentially become a dangerous individual who can shift the course of history. Based on the Wikipedia, Coe seemed like a somewhat influential man, but in a more battered America, he could’ve gained far more power.
He doesn’t come across to me as any more sinister then any other influential Evangelical at the time. While I certainly can’t say one way or the other whether he’d accept an authoritarian Christian state I do think that he and millions of other Christians would balk at what exists in Rumsfeldia.
That’s not the issue here, the issue is that Coe as Drew portrayed him is a Christian Mullah Omar with nukes. This is so far removed from the real person’s personality that it veers into absurdity. To put it another way, do you really believe Drew was being fair when he wrote some of these people the way that they are? From that Wiki page do you get the vibe that this is the man who would bomb Congress if he could? Do you get that feeling about anybody that Drew wrote as a one dimensional monster?
More in FLaG news:
apnews.com
Pete McCloskey, GOP congressman who once challenged Nixon, dies at 96
Former California Congressman Pete McCloskey, who ran as a Republican challenging President Richard Nixon in 1972, has died.
apnews.com
More in FLaG news:
Pete McCloskey, GOP congressman who once challenged Nixon, dies at 96
Former California Congressman Pete McCloskey, who ran as a Republican challenging President Richard Nixon in 1972, has died.
I think of Pete McCloskey as kind of the anti-Lesser Mao of the Gumboverse.
Lesser Mao was an obscure figure who, under different circumstances from OTL, managed to rise to power and fame, but in Lesser Mao's case, he made history horrifically worse, not merely committing atrocities but destroying Chinese civilization itself.
Pete McCloskey is mostly unknown outside of environmental circles, and his TTL entry into the history books is similarly a fluke: the nomination of a Louisiana governor created vast political fractures that allowed him to narrowly become governor of California and end up as the man who saved North American civilization from an American nationalism run amok.
I wonder what TTL Pete would make of OTL American history.
The anti-Lesser Mao indeed. A great way to put it.
I imagine a lot of people would be amazed at how non-anarchic our world is!
I compare it to Teddy Roosevelt: Roosevelt was a rabble-rouser within his party and thus given a sinecure, the Vice Presidency, where he could be given a public role with little substantive power. And it would be an unexpected event, an anarchist's gun that would put Roosevelt into the presidency, shifting the course of history. In this case, the stars aligned in a way that benefited society as a whole.
McCloskey's rise to power is a mixture of one unexpected event changing history and those changes causing different macrohistorical forces. McCloskey's decision to join McGovern's third party was the unforeseen event that opened the door to a chaotic constitutional crisis. And the aftershocks of that crisis allowed McCloskey to rise to prominence.
OTL McCloskey's position as a liberal Republican environment pushed him into political obscurity as his party became more and more reactionary. But the TTL breakdown of the two-party system allowed a figure like him to gain political power he didn't have. And when his own party went from conservative to straight-up ultranationalist and dictatorial under Rumsfeld, he emerged as the ideal force of resistance: a political refugee in a less polarized era where compromise was possible, and politicians cared about improving a lot of society and one side didn't exist to demonize the other.
A People's Republic of China that emerged OTL would be jarring to them. TTL, Maoism was a monstrous ideology that not only killed millions but completely desecrated a centuries-old civilization. The idea that the PRC reformed itself would feel like an ASB fantasy...although they would probably see Xi Jinping as a less-batshit version of Lesser Mao. It's the same thing with India and Brazil intact and South Africa not collapsing into a nuclear race war.
But what would probably jar them the most is the OTL success of conservatism. TTL, American conservatism devolved into straight-up fascism and oligarchy: the once-trusted figures of American life, businessmen, and churches became parasites who bled their population dry and then attempted nuclear genocide when they dared rebel. The rise of figures like Reagan and Nixon TTL heralded the beginning of America's decay, not the OTL renewal that many people view the Reagan years as being.
In the Gumboworld, Maggie Thatcher is that loony, disgraced politician turned Rumsfeldia apologist. Seeing her OTL success would be like an OTL Brit discovering a world where Oswald Mosley became Prime Minister. Combined with the fact that the Eastern bloc collapsed in a relatively peaceful manner and that even supposedly left-leaning American Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama became pro-business, many people would view the OTL world as some conservative wank.
However, the existence of someone like Donald Trump and the power of OTL Evangelicals would make them question whether OTL is just a more polite dystopia. TTL Donald Trump is a failed property developer and White Castle manager who sold balding snake oil. In OTL America, Trump has not only been rewarded despite his scummy business practices, but a huge chunk of the population worships him as their messiah.
Someone who lived through TTL Rumsfeld's anarcho-capitalism and the CV's genocidal madness would be disturbed to see Evangelicals rallying around Donald Trump, Jerry Falwell getting away with blaming 9/11 on gay people, a Supreme Court ruling that campaign finance laws are a violation of free speech, and millions of middle-aged men watching Fox News almost religiously.
What would be especially confounding to the TTL Rumsfeldian survivors is this: the Rumsfeldians and Christian Values built their monstrous orders through bullying and repression, while in OTL, most people...just went along with it. The Mississippi housewife doesn't vote for the "anti-government" tax cutter because of coercion, she does it because decades of conditioning and polarizing language have convinced her that paid maternity leave is a liberal plot that will destroy America, internalizing the messages of their political abusers.
As horrific as the events of the Gumbo-verse are, the people left to pick up the pieces of those ruins have a mandate to do better than their predecessors. While a TTL version of that Mississippi housewife would long for a world where America didn't collapse into totalitarianism and civil war, she might be horrified to see her OTL herself watching Fox News as a religious gospel, praising a duplicitous businessman as a messiah, and calling Trent Lott a hero to the little guy.